Ashton Kutcher Plays Steve Jobs, But We Don’t Get To Know Steve Jobs

Apple fans are going to be very mixed on Jobs. On one hand here’s the story they’ve been dying to see, on screen, and it looks great. But the film feels slight because it tries to do too much. The effort is there and the film is entertaining, but it’s feels like the PC version of the story instead of the Apple.

Ashton Kutcher Does Well, But The Movie Fails To Think Different

After 10 days of watching Sundance films that wholly reject traditional Hollywood formulas, it’s exhausting to see the work Joshua Michael Stern does here, leaning heavily on an overbearing score and soft lighting and scenes that lay out the film’s themes as broadly as a corporate presentation. The Steve Jobs of this movie, who’s constantly berating his employees to come up with something better than the status quo, would have hated the pat sentiments and dull direction of jOBS. Apple urged people to think different. jOBS does anything but.

Ashton Kutcher Does A Solid Steve in ‘jOBS,’ But Is This Tame Biopic a Lost Cause From the Start?

As a whole, the movie inevitably suffers from comparison to “The Social Network,” another recent biopic about cutthroat tech innovators that’s superior in every way. The David Fincher-directed movie burrowed inside the essence of competitive young brilliance and triumphantly explored how inspired minds engage in endless competition. “jOBS” renders the same forces through the Apple founder’s ongoing persistence without a modicum of depth. “We gotta risk everything,” Jobs tells his team early on. The movie could have taken that advice; the problem with “jOBS” is that it plays too safe.